When comparing Quassel vs Konversation, the Slant community recommends Quassel for most people. In the question“What are the best IRC clients for Windows?” Quassel is ranked 7th while Konversation is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Quassel is:
Quassal is available for free with source code licensed under GPL and available [here](http://bugs.quassel-irc.org/projects/quassel-irc/repository).
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Quassal is available for free with source code licensed under GPL and available here.
Pro Distributed
It's possible for a front-end client or multiple front-end clients to connect to a single core client. This allows setting up an always on-line core that can be accessed from anywhere.
Pro Easy installation on Ubuntu due to the existence of PPA's
Right now Quassel has a PPA maintainer, which allows you to install the stable version or daily versions.
Support for PostgreSQL as database backend and easy to configure for people that know a bit about systems.
Pro Regularly maintained
Konversation is still being updated with new features and bug fixes. Konversation 1.5(released January 15, 2014) has added plenty of major features.
Pro Notifications
Konversation has an OSD(On Screen Display) feature that gives you an overlay message anytime your nick is mentioned. This means you won't be interrupted from your work and reduces the need to keep the window open.
Pro Plenty of useful smaller features
Koversation is full of features to make IRC simpler and smoother. It comes with tools like a channel bookmarker, the ability to insert special characters easily and the "URL catcher", which gives quick access to any links mentioned in the channel.
Pro Quick Buttons
The Quick Buttons features allows you to set a button to any IRC command that you frequently use. It has several defaults such as whois, and kick but a button can be created for any command you need.
Pro Very professional UI design
Cons
Con Potential memory bloat in monolithic client if left running for a period of time
(I don't know if this problem has been fixed in recent years, but I have doubts)
Con No DCC support
DCC or Direct Client-to-Client protocol allows for private communications between users (without the traffic being routed through servers). Neither chat nor file transfers are supported.
Con Updating to a new version overwrites configuration settings
Colors, fonts and autojoin behaviors may be customizable, but backing up the settings prior to updating the software is imperative.